This week in KDE: more speed, more features, and a bug massacre

This week should have a little something for everyone. We’ve got bug squashing galore in preparation for Plasma 5.18, substantial speed improvements for wifi connection and Discover launch time, some welcome new features, and the return of an old one–renaming files from the context menu in file dialogs.

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

27 thoughts on “This week in KDE: more speed, more features, and a bug massacre”

Thanks for the effort. I have a question, whenever i use night color feature it disables configured icc profile, which also happen in redshift if one doesn’t use it with “preserve color” option, which doesn’t happen in gnome. Is there bug report for that or is it also related with Bug 413134 (Night colors disabled when we open gamma in settings)

Those are some massive bug fixes, thank you.
“When using Chromium/Chrome with client-side decorations, the maximize button now changes appropriately when the window is maximized”
Very cool, but it looks like that bug is still present for Firefox and Thunderbird. At least to my knowledge.

It would be very nice if context menu in the open/save dialogs would have also the “Open” option.
This is very useful when you click on the “Browse…” button in the web browser in some upload form and this dialog opens and you want, at that time, to make sure you are uploading the right file by checking it one more time by opening it with its associated program.
Sometimes the name of the file is not enough to be sure and opening it separately it would be great for pictures and PDF documents.
On Windows 7, when a picture is opened from context menu in the open/save dialog, the “Open” is smartly displayed as “Preview” which is quite good for what I want to do (preview it before selecting it for upload).

The faster connecting to a wifi network is very nice.
I already switched to iwd (iNet wireless daemon) in Kubuntu 19.10 to get faster connecting to wireless network, which I got, but sometimes it fails to connect at all and I don’t know why.
So, I’m very happy you’re trying to do this with the default option, but I hope this doesn’t slowes down the boot.
I want my computer to boot as fast as possible independent of the network state.
I prefer the network connecting and all the other stuff to happen after the boot process has been completed.

If there aren’t any vaults configured like after you install the OS and the Plasma Vaults item is hidden automatically, how do you create one ?
Is it possible to do it from the start menu ?
I always found this item weird to be displayed when I din’t use this feature, but now that I do, I’m wondering if these change will affect the creation of one.

BTW, somebody made a really stupid decision (I don’t want to offend anyone, but I’m really annoyed) in one of last month updates.

I’m using a Password manager called KeePassXC and since I don’t want to be easily revealed that I’m using it (by showing in the start menu or Discover) and where is it’s database file located, I decided to put it in a Plasma Vault.
So I have 2 files:
KeePassXC-2.5.1-x86_64.AppImage
Passwords.kdbx (its database file)
Every time I need to pen the password manager I double click on the KeePassXC-2.5.1-x86_64.AppImage, enter my master password and voila, everything works.
This has been working ok for months until recent updates which broke my ability to open any .AppImage file in my plasma Vault with the stupid message:
“The file …/KeePassXC-2.5.1-x86_64.AppImage is an executable program. For safety it will not be started.”
The file it still has the “Is executable” permission like it had for months, but now I cannot open it anymore.
I copied to a test folder outside of the vault, but I still have the same stupid message.
I know that Plasma has a pretty bad support for running .AppImage programs, but now it’s even worse.
I don’t want to open a terminal each time I want to run a .AppImage program.
Now I regret that I installed the updates so soon instead of waiting for some months and now I have to deal with this serious productivity regression.

I have heard before the request to allow opening a file from the file dialog without really opening it. Basically the desire is a quick but large/full size preview, right? macOS does this really well with its “Quick Look” feature that allows you to see a full-size preview from the file dialog. The file dialog already has a little preview sidebar (which is closed by default), but it would be nicer to be able to see a larger preview, yeah. I’ll keep this in mind.

The Vaults item is still visible in the Stay Tray’s popup. “Hidden” isn’t really the best word to describe this, sorry.

As for your AppImage problem, this is a bug, and a really annoying one. I got another report of it and investigated, but I was unable to reproduce the issue myself or identify a bug in the code that caused it. 😦 Could you please file a bug report?

“baloo stores tags in xattrs (extended attributes) on the filesystem. To show them as entered in dolphin, type: xattr -l * assuming the right packages (“xattr” in debian) are installed.”
> https://userbase.kde.org/Baloo

Problem: What happens if you copy a file to another system/file system. Tags are lost? I read several times that digiKam has a similar problem.

Generally, yes. If the foreign filesystem doesn’t support xattr attributes, then they’ll be lost. Similar to how Classic macOS files would have resource fork data stripped when copied to a Windows filesystem.

Great, especially seeing ”When searching for tags in Dolphin, the tag menu stays now open after you select each tag so you don’t need to re-open it if you want to search for files with multiple tags” made me really happy, I wasn’t expecting such a quick fix for that. KDE devs are really impressive. 🙂